Birth of a Movement – Aboriginal Broadcasting in the Eighties

(Being the second of four posts marking the tenth anniversary of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. Part One here.)

It was clear that Aboriginal communities, from reserves in Saskatchewan to remote Arctic settlements, were going to be hugely affected by the tidal wave of southern television programming flooding their homes. In 1980 the CRTC’s Therrien Committee recommended after extensive consultation that that satellites be used to relay Canadian television programming to the north, but that “urgent measures be taken to enable northern native people to use broadcasting to support their languages and cultures.” The Inukshuk project was singled out for special praise as a possible model.

Inukshuk had been a success by any yardstick, but it was scheduled to end in 1980. ITC raised enough money to keep the project rolling for another three years, and created a new organization – the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation – to provide Inuit media services for the long haul. I moved to Iqaluit, and with a small team of producers and managers in Ottawa and five Nunavut communities began to figure out how you’d actually create a permanent Inuit television system.

IBC hammered out a long-term vision and set out some very ambitious goals in a discussion paper. These included:
• Funding for all Inuit broadcasters similar to that provided to the CBC
• Recognition of Aboriginal broadcasters in the Broadcast Act
• A special CRTC policy on Aboriginal broadcasters
• The creation of a dedicated northern transponder…a satellite channel that would carry nothing by northern programming.

At the time this seemed like a complete pipe dream – a political statement designed to get Aboriginal broadcasting on the policy agenda. Amazingly, within twenty years each one of those goals was actually achieved.

The position paper got quite widely distributed, and several other groups either endorsed it or added their own vision. A very supportive Inuit leadership, some skilled bureaucrats, and sympathetic folks at CBC worked over the next year on a request to Cabinet. There was a real sense that something was going to happen, but no-one was sure quite what it would be.

Meanwhile training was happening in remote settlements across Northern Canada – places like Nain, Iqaluit, Baker Lake and Cambridge Bay. TV stations need technical staff…camera people, editors, switchers, sound persons, editors. They need production personnel to develop content…researchers, writers, directors, producers, journalists, on-air personnel. They need administrative overhead…accounting staff, secretarial support, management. All these needs had to be met in communities without community colleges or experienced broadcasters, using inferior, industrial production equipment in basements, abandoned classrooms, or, in Cambridge Bay, a plywood shed donated by the hamlet.

I had worked with trainees before. But this team was absolutely committed to the project. This wasn’t just another make-work training program…everyone knew they were building a TV network. They were producing real programming, to a deadline. And their work was also under very public scrutiny. There’s no professional distance between broadcasters and their public in the North. The person standing next to you at the checkout counter in the Bay will cheerfully provide you with a point by point critique of the program you put on air the night before. In Baker Lake, as a matter of fact, you didn’t even have to wait until the next day. Producers would turn on their CB radios after each broadcast and listen for the reviews.

All the policy work and lobbying paid off in 1983, when the Federal Government announced its Northern Broadcasting Policy and the four-year Northern Native Broadcast Access Program (NNBAP), originally budgeted at $40.3 M, designed to give Aboriginal communications organizations in thirteen regions funding to produce radio and television programming in their own languages.

Even in 2009 that still sounds like a lot of money. It isn’t. The funding was based on a calculation that said an hour of television costs 5,000 to produce. The cost of producing an hour of programming at CBC in 1983 was 36,000.00. So it wasn’t quite the lavish giveaway that the number suggests. Still, for the first time, northern Aboriginal broadcasters had a relatively solid base to build on, and we knew that for at least the next four years there would be funding.

The organizations took root – in Whitehorse, Yellowknife, Salluit, Nain, Sioux Lookout and a dozen other communities – and programming started to flow. Some specialized in news, some in cultural documentaries, some in entertainment – and almost all of it was in native languages.

You could never can tell what would pop up in a newscast. The top IBC news story of 1986 was the birth of a nine-legged caribou foetus. This was captured on tape, and IBC got more calls from viewers across the north than on any other item. It was run three times, and people still remember it. IBC included some shots of this poor little nine legged foetus in the demo tape that it took round to show the funders what they were doing, and I confess to a certain nasty pleasure in watching federal officials trying to keep down their lunches.

So there were organization in place. There were talented and creative producers in place. There was funding and political support in place. The one missing element in the early 1980s was a distribution system.

The Northern Broadcasting Policy, released in 1983 to respond to priorities identified by the Therrien Committee, stated as one of its principles that northern native people should have “fair access” to northern broadcasting distribution systems to maintain and develop their cultures and languages. It didn’t define Fair Access, however…it left that up to the people who owned the distribution systems. In the north that meant the CBC.

CBC at the time had a number of smart, committed people who were sympathetic to the Aboriginal broadcasters’ needs. But they only had so much time for their own regional program, and native-language programming, as a priority, came last on the list, and in the schedule. Rosemary Kuptana, commenting on the timeslots in those days, once quipped that “God made our land the land of the midnight sun…it took the CBC to make it the Land of Midnight television.” Programs, including children’s shows, were run after eleven or twelve, and were subject to pre-emption whenever a hockey game ran late.

Amazingly, people were still watching. Audience survey after audience survey confirmed that groups like Wawatay, TNI and IBC were pulling in up to 95 percent of their potential viewers. But it was very clear that this couldn’t be sustained. CBC Northern service wanted to expand its own northern programming, and the unwelcome guests were getting squeezed out more and more often.

The folks of Wawatay submitted a tongue in cheek proposal to distribute videotapes to remote settlements by carrier pigeon. But a more practical answer was the solution that IBC had proposed at the very outset…a dedicated northern transponder, a purely northern satellite channel that provide access for everybody programming in the north. The idea had never gone away, and it was raised again and again before all the parliamentary committees and task forces on northern communications that dotted the landscape in the eighties. Gradually a working group evolved, spearheaded by Rosemarie Kuptana of IBC and by George Henry from Northern Native Broadcasting in the Yukon.

And it worked. In 1988, the Minister of Communications, Flora MacDonald, introduced a new broadcasting policy and the new draft broadcasting legislation on June 23, 1988. The policy included funding of 10 million dollars to create an independent satellite-delivered programming distribution system specifically designed for northern audiences.

I had been with IBC for nearly ten years, and I really had nothing left to contribute. The producers, directors, and crews were better producers than I had ever been. Several had left IBC and were working for CBC: some, like Sak Kunuk and Paul Apak, had become freelance producers and were creating quite a stir in the south and internationally with their work. I figured I’d see life from the other side for a bit, and accepted a job in the Aboriginal broadcast program with the federal government.

One week before I left IBC, the Feds announced that they were cutting the Native Communications Program completely and cutting back the NNBAP by about thirty percent. In other words, having just provided millions of dollars in funding for a new northern network, they were clawing back millions of dollars from the producers who were going to provide it programming.

I spent my last week and weekend as an IBC employee writing furious letters of protest about this appalling decision. On Monday I started work at Secretary of State. Three days later, on Thursday, I received the first of my letters and responded indignantly to myself on behalf of her Majesty.

There was, in fact, quite an uproar about the cuts. There were demonstrations across Canada, and Jerry Weiner, who was then Secretary Of State, was burned in effigy in Iqaluit. I had never actually seen anybody else burned in effigy in Iqaluit. However, after all the sound and fury ebbed, nothing happened. The government had drawn a line in the sand, and they never did restore funding to the Aboriginal Broadcasters. The rationale went something like: well, we’ve been funding them for seven years now. It’s time they became self-sufficient.

This, of course, was all decided without any real analysis of the degree to which the broadcasters could in fact become self sufficient, which would have shown what a truly idiotic concept that was. Commercial television lives on advertising revenues. Advertisers pay based on how many people are watching a program, and how many of those viewers are likely to buy the product being advertised. There weren’t many viewers in Labrador, and their incomes were below the average income of someone living in Toronto: if you had a product or a service to sell, it simply did not pay for you to advertise in the north. Your advertising budget would generate more sales in another market. Television in rural and remote Canada is not a paying proposition.

The broadcasters coped with the cuts as best they could, and planning for Television Northern Canada continued. The network’s main presentation centre was built in Iqaluit. Additional satellite dishes were installed in Whitehorse and Yellowknife, so programming, live or taped, could be uplinked from any of those locations. Equipment had to be installed in 94 communities across the north so that they could receive the signal.

There was a lot of work, there was a lot of planning, and there were a lot of panicky people – including me. At the request of the TVNC Board, I had been seconded back to the organization to help produce their inaugural broadcast – three hours , rotating twenty minute live blocks from Yellowknife, Iqaluit and Whitehorse. Studio audiences, live performers, the Governor General, tons of bridge mini-documentaries, the works – and carried nationally by Newsworld.

It was a memorable night, and went off without a hitch. Almost.

We were ten minutes into the first Iqaluit segment, and I was on the phone to Yellowknife, counting them down to their first first feed. I heard a very quiet “pop”, our Yellowknife monitor went black, and someone at the other end of the phone said, very softly: “Oh, shit.”

The TV lights had blown the fuse in the Legion Hall. Not your basic household fuse, but a massive industrial fuse. An audience of hundreds, crew and performers sitting in the dark, and three minutes to their first segment.

Joanne Henry in the NNBY Whitehorse studio told us Yukon could be ready in three minutes. Meanwhile some broadcast hero in YK raced out of the Legion Hall, down the street to the YK Inn, and “borrowed” the necessary fuse. Somehow within twenty minutes they got power up, everything rebalanced and remixed, restored the connection, and were ready to roll. And nobody noticed a thing.

TVNC provided the northern native broadcasters with their own channel, and the distribution pressure was off. But the network was only available in the north. Which led to the next big question…